2/01/2010 @ 1:15AM

Technology's Language Barrier

A Chinese-born patient at a hospital in New London, Conn., had her medical insurance claim rejected because nurses put down her husband’s last name when she was admitted instead of her own.

A simple cultural and linguistic misunderstanding caused the confusion; in China, women don’t normally change their names when they get married.

Asian-Americans also faced problems when they went to vote in the last U.S. presidential election. They found out their first and last names were inverted or misspelled, leaving many of them unable to cast their ballots.

Blunders like these can be costly. And as burgeoning markets in Asia increase in importance, new insight is required to break through what you could call a language barrier.

As a result of the globalization of business through mergers and international investment, English has become a lingua franca. Almost two billion people worldwide speak it, and more than half of these learned it as a second language. Moreover, global popular culture is dominated by English-language television, music, film, print and social media.

There has been a parallel surge in the use of the Internet. It is estimated that 900 million people worldwide can tap into Web-based information sources and consumer sites, a rate expected to double in the next two years. Most of these users do not speak English, and over 250 million reside in Asia, according to Global Envision.org.

Clout will shift even more toward the East in the future. English-speaking nations are much closer to the saturation point when it comes to Internet use, so non-English-speaking nations represent the bulk of future growth.

E-commerce hinges on language, too. According to a Common Sense Advisory survey, 52% of consumers will only buy something from a Web site in their own language, and 64% of those surveyed said they would pay more for a product if they could get product information they could read.

So if only for organizations that can interact successfully with consumers in emerging markets, assumptions about language and communication must shift from an Anglocentric view to one that accommodates local languages, writing systems and conventions.

To be sure, passing information through systems designed by people speaking different languages and using different writing systems can increase the level of vulnerability to translation errors.

For example, some Asian writing systems, such as Chinese Hanzi and Japanese Kanji, are not based on an alphabet the way English is. The usual computer algorithms, matching a letter to a sound, don’t apply.

Complicating matters further for Anglocentric systems, most characters in China and Japan have multiple pronunciations. In China, for example, where a number of different dialects are spoken, the same character can be pronounced in myriad ways.

The result is that when a Chinese name is written in the English alphabet, it may be spelled in completely different ways. For example, the seemingly dissimilar surnames Ng and Wu used in America are both written in China with the same Chinese character.

KFC’s slogan “finger-lickin’ good” was mistranslated into Chinese characters that meant “eat your fingers off.” But China was opening up to foreign companies, and
Yum! Brands
‘ KFC benefited from the curiosity of citizens about all things Western.

The brand name
Coca-Cola
in China was first translated as a phrase pronounced Ke-kou-ke-la. Unfortunately, the company did not discover until after thousands of signs had been printed that the phrase means “bite the wax tadpole” or “female horse stuffed with wax” depending on the dialect. Coca-Cola then researched 40,000 Chinese characters and found a close phonetic equivalent, “ke-kou-ke-le,” which can be loosely translated as “happiness in the mouth.”

Another problem: In China, Korea and Japan, for example, family names come before first names, exactly opposite to the practice in most Western countries. Thus, Huang Shu Dong, whose given name is Shu Dong, may find Huang entered as his first name in an American database. These errors, in turn, often make it difficult or impossible for customer service representatives to find records linked to the correct name.

Organizations need to create a seamless cross-language flow of information for gathering and managing crucial identifying data. Building something like this would also allow companies to gather intelligence about their new customer base.

To meet these challenges, information technologies must be smarter, beginning at the design of data intake processes and throughout record storage and linkage. Cultural and linguistic expertise, as well as IT-expertise, is required. Software and systems must be able to adapt quickly for use by an increasingly non-English user base.

From the standpoint of the Asian users who will enter information, data entry must be clear and unambiguous, designed according to local understandings of names. At the same time, to compensate for the inevitable errors, retrieving the many possible variants of a single name requires sophisticated, culturally sensitive search and match techniques.

The modification of names is nothing new. The difference today is that we have the technological capability both to preserve linguistic and cultural diversity and succeed at business. As Asia flexes its growing economic muscle, smart companies must be prepared to handle the ensuing tsunami of cross-language data.

Jack Halpern is CEO of The CJK Dictionary Institute, Inc. Frankie Patman is a linguist at IBM.